Why did Israel create an honor for non-Jews who risked their lives in the Holocaust?

Because some of the people who saved Jews during the Holocaust were not Jewish, risked their own lives to do it, and Israel wanted them remembered by name. When the Knesset established Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, in 1953, one of its tasks was to commemorate the "Righteous Among the Nations": non-Jews who, out of altruism, risked their lives to save Jews from being exterminated by Nazi Germany.

What they stood against was immense. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews, about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, mainly through mass shootings in Eastern Europe and gas chambers in extermination camps. One historian estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe, and those in hiding depended on the help of non-Jews. That help carried real danger: the death penalty was sometimes enforced on people who hid Jews, especially in Eastern Europe. In Paris, Si Kaddour Benghabrit and Abdelkader Mesli hid hundreds of Jews in the basements of the Grand Mosque. In Denmark, the resistance helped most of the country's Jews escape to Sweden in late 1943.

Each case is checked before anyone is named. Since 1963, a commission headed by a justice of Israel's Supreme Court has studied the documentation, including evidence from survivors and other eyewitnesses. The help must have been repeated or substantial and given without expecting any financial gain, although covering costs such as food is acceptable. As of January 2023, 28,486 men and women from 51 countries had been recognized, from more than 10,000 authenticated rescue stories. When the Algerian Catholic nun Marguerite Bernes was recognized in 1974, she said of the honour: "we simply did our duty."